Developing the habit of not stopping too early

Grit vs. the Pareto principle: When is going all the way to the end worth it?

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There’s a thing my Dad calls “terrier mentality”. It’s probably a special case of the more general concept that self-help authors call “grit”. What it means is that you don’t stop once you’ve achieved a serviceable solution to your current problem, you stop once you’ve created a solution for every possible iteration of the problem. Often, this means taking a thing completely apart and putting it back together with added functionality. Redesigning something from first principles. Putting in ten hours when two would’ve been the minimum necessary to get you out of your current predicament.

The inverse of this strategy is clever application of the Pareto principle. You can often achieve 80% of the end result by going 20% of the way, but a day has only twenty-four hours, and there are many instances where 80% result is enough. Two examples:

- I buy protein powder that’s only slightly better than the cheapest kind the internet has to offer. My comrades often spend twice as much, but their results aren’t 100% better. I don’t think it makes sense for me to further optimise this.

-A fairly clean living space can be achieved with 20% of the effort of a spotless one (common example).

When someone goes much further than 20% in the second case, our reaction tends to be to label them a germaphobe. So clearly it’s often a wise idea to apply moderation and not go after The Thing In Question like a terrier.

But there is a second category of thing: the one where you can reap previously unimaginable benefits by hounding it like a terrier.

I first clearly observed this in myself after I learned the self-management system Getting Things Done. The system I used previously was a combination of to-do lists, a calendar, a notetaking app, and relying on memory. It also was a mess. Most GTD improvements seem like low-hanging fruits in retrospect: keeping to-do list and calendar separate, writing down everything in one place, etc. I am astounded I did not come up with them myself, because they seem so obvious now. Ideally, I should have noticed that something was off about my organisational system and put in the ten hours to improve it. I didn’t, and I thought I was applying the Pareto principle until I stumbled upon GTD by chance.

Now I’m worried there might be further areas in my life where I think I’m currently doing the sensible thing by reigning in my perfectionism, while I would be better served by putting in the ten hours asap. There’s a sensemaking concept adjacent to this: What rationalists call Noticing Your Confusion.

Often, the confused mental concept might only be minor, but fully resolving the confusion would open up whole new worlds of insight. Doing this consequently will compound over time, and compounding has magic powers. So when is it worth it?

I don’t know. Some things are clearly in the category of thing where a half-baked solution suffices, and others are not. I’m going to keep practicing going all the way, until I hopefully one day have gotten better at telling the categories apart.

#things in that category of thing #adulting #tbc